I find myself nervously clutching my chair as I sit here alone in the pitch black, listening to the new Lustmord album, Other. The sounds created by dark ambient progenitor Brian Williams are unbearably unnerving, but what worries me more is that Williams found it appropriate to come out of a 25-year hiatus to play The Center for the Inquiry, where a Satanic High Mass was held on 06-06-2006 with sounds provided by Williams himself. It was an event that marked the 40th anniversary of the Church of Satan. Listening to the impenetrably dark sounds that make up Other, I am becoming increasingly curious as to what may have occurred that night. Though Williams claims to be an atheist, I can’t shake the feeling that his music was used as some sort of alchemic background for a black magik ritual involving either the birth or conception of some sort of Rosemary’s Baby-type Antichrist. "Paranoid rambling," I’m sure you’re thinking -- but considering the black hole that is Lustmord’s music, if there weren’t a demon child gestating in at least one potential womb, then Lustmord’s music itself would certainly manifest one.
Besides providing a soundscape to usher in demon children, Lustmord has been actively contributing to both mainstream and countercultures for over 30 years. His work with iconoclastic industrial acts like SPK and Throbbing Gristle didn’t prevent him from “reaching across the aisle” into more capitalist ventures: His work has provided soundtracks for blockbuster films, most notably The Crow and Underworld, and when he’s not making field recordings in caves and slaughterhouses, he’s turning out profit-rendering ambience for NIKE and Playstation ads. Williams’ main strength lies in the creation of terrifying sonic worlds that purvey all the paranoid tension of a David Lynch flick. In fact, Lynch’s own musical ventures (on albums like 2007’s The Air is on Fire) are a great comparison point to the music of Lustmord (in fact it’s most likely the ’Mord that influenced Lynch in this case).
As evident on tracks like "Godeater," a 22-minute behemoth that sits like a pound of severed human flesh slowly dripping blood in the middle of a banquet dinner, Williams doesn’t go for much theatrics. As is the case with all proper dark ambient music, there aren’t many peaks and valleys on Other — just persistent creep and tension. Some may find these decimated landscapes too stagnant and unchanging, while DA purists will attest to the necessity of keeping it within this narrow spectrum of emotion. According to Brian Eno, the true nature of ambient is to skirt a line between total encapsulation of the mind and the tendency to get lost in the background. Simply put, ambient music, in one way or another, is trance-inducing; too much fluctuation would break the trance.
That’s not to say that Other is one long flatline, as there are many elements that come out of the mix; it’s just more subtle than a spring-boarded cardboard mummy in a haunted house. Trebly slices of guitar dirge (courtesy of King Buzzo of The Melvins) pepper the album on tracks like "Godeater" and "Dark Awakening," while Williams employs Tibetan horns to accentuate his epiglottal emanations on "Element," which I assume to be a recreation of some lost Enochian vision-magik language. So, while some heathens may find this music “boring,” some purists may in fact find it too busy. For me, the temperature of Lustmord’s dark cosmic porridge is just right.